Iraq’s Kurdish Peshmerga has offered the stiffest resistance to ISIS in Iraq. The Kurds don’t really want their territory in northern Iraq to be part of Iraq; they’d prefer their own country. Iraq’s central government doesn’t want that because that’s where most of Iraq’s oil is located. The Iraq government tries to limit arms shipments to the Kurds, fearing it would aid their independence efforts, even though the Kurds have done a far better job of fighting ISIS than Iraq’s army. It has often turned tail and run, leaving behind a lot of expensive US supplied arms for ISIS to scoop up. From Mustafa Sayid Qadir, the Kurdish Minister for Peshmerga affairs:
Our enemy is very well-armed. The better weapons we get, the fewer sacrifies in lives we will have to make to resist it. They target us with weapons that were abandoned in Ramadi. Wouldn’t it have been better if the Iraqi army had given them to us instead of giving them to ISIS?
The Wall Street Journal, “Outgunned by Islamic State, Kurd Fear They Are Next,” 6/5/15
Good question.
